Experience at Scale with Christine Pizzo, Director of Design at Intrepid, an Accenture Studio

“Find your strength and then just attack that, kind of like Savant style. Ignore all of the other things. That’s how people rise to the top.”

Christine Pizzo is a strategic design leader with a masters in design as well as experience across both very small firms and multi-national agencies. Today, Christine is Director of Design at Intrepid an Accenture Studio, growing her talented design team from 13 to 33 designers in only a couple of years. I had an inspiring chat with Christine as she shared insights on her favourite projects, her ‘shadowy’ design process, and how designers should focus on their inherent strengths.

AN: Tell me a little bit about your career so far

I started from Craigslist, ironically enough. I had graduated undergrad and found a small advertising agency in Richmond that needed a social media person, actually their first digital person in general. I fell into both the design and digital world. It wasn’t something I expected or even knew I’d be good at.

I went back to grad school to get a masters in Creative Technology (now titled Experience Design.) That fundamentally changed what I thought I wanted to do. After that I moved to Boston and worked for a big agency called Digitas where I was designing the Baskin Robbins app.

Now I’m at Intrepid. It’s only eight years old and was all developers up until three years ago. I’ve been Director of Design here for about a year now. When I started, we had thirteen designers on the team aside from myself, and now we have thirty-three. And while I try to be a creator as much as possible, my director duties now take up the majority of my time. It’s what I’m personally more focused on – to grow into being a good leader

It was quite a big jump from when I was just doing projects. In addition to logistical things such as resourcing and raises, my day to day includes one-on-one career advice and management to senior designers as well as others who have enough experience that it’s relevant for me to mentor them. Those senior members then counsel more junior team members. I kind of grandfather them all.

AN: Tell me a little bit about your favorite project.

CP: The first one I ever worked on here in Intrepid was called TrACK Nantucket. You can download it, but it’s only really for the island of Nantucket. It is this curated bike path that’s for not only safety, but tourism. I did all the hand illustrations for that.

We had to do a lot of networking with people who live on the island and have lived there for fifty years. So many different museums and so forth. What was really interesting about that is, we had to rebuild a GPS system that didn’t even exist! Google couldn’t even do this — having the turn by turn directions while also serving content.

AN: Can you share something unique about your own design process?

CP: I’m a very pictorial person in general. If you tell me where to go, at a restaurant or whatever, I never remember the names of the streets, but I’ll tell you all the landmarks. I do that in my head as well.

When I’m trying to ideate a solution for a design, I kind of 3D model it in my head in a way. Then I have to sketch it out in really broad strokes quickly on a notepad, and then I start transferring things to Sketch or anything a little more concrete than that. I really have to be able to almost touch or feel it as if it was in the world.

I also go after design from a very strategic and ideation standpoint. I enjoy the problem-solving aspect of it as well being like every designer: OCD, and wanting to fix all the pixels.

AN: How does your design approach change when a client comes to you and asks for both a website and mobile app at the same time?

I do this thing that I call shadow designing wherein I don’t sit there and design all the mobile screens first but rather design one main feature in mobile and then design it in web. I’ll do this for the first three or four big moments in the app; the critical ones that feel very challenging. Then, I go and finish all the mobile screens and all the web screens.

I really don’t think you can do a justifiable job of something if you aren’t thinking about both at the same moment, especially if it’s responsive. You don’t get to pick what’s on mobile and pull it up and rejigger it. You have to design web and mobile at the same time. That shadow pairing is what I’ve taught a lot of the designers here. I think it does change your thinking pattern, because you’re not completely ignoring something because it’s easy to ignore.

“You don’t get to pick what’s on mobile and pull it up and rejigger it. You have to design web and mobile at the same time.”

AN: What advice would you give to someone early in their mobile design career?

Find your strength and then just attack that, kind of like Savant style. Ignore all of the other things. That’s how people rise to the top. They ignore every other type of design and go after that one thing, because that’s what makes you stand out. Or one or two things, you’ll know whatever it is. Always be on the lookout to understand what is the singular thing that adds the most value to all the interactions you’re in.

That’s the one thing that has taken me the longest and makes me feel the most confident about knowing I’m on the right path.

– Alan Nowogrodski, MUX Founder